Blue Laser Could Lead to Autism Cure

[yunowu]

Lasers could one day cure, or at least aid in the search for drugs that treat diseases ranging from autism to schizophrenia, according to two new studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University and published in the online issue of the journal Nature.

A blue laser shined into a live mouse brain triggered gamma waves, which are a kind of brain wave necessary for concentration and cognition that people with autism and schizophrenia often lack.

"There are lots of theories about why [gamma wave oscillation] is impaired," said Li-Huei Tsai, a professor at MIT and a co-author on one of the Nature papers.

"This is the first proof that a specific set of neurons are responsible for gamma waves."

The specific neurons that trigger gamma waves are called fast-spiking interneurons. Connected to hundreds of other neurons, interneurons regulate which neurons fire and which neurons remain silent. The coordinated firing of these neurons creates a variety of brain waves, from ten waves per second of alpha waves to 40 waves per second of gamma waves.

Scientists have known about gamma waves for decades. Using techniques that measure the brain's electrical activity, like EEG, scientists detect gamma waves when subjects concentrate during activities like test-taking.

One characteristic of people with autism, attention deficit disorder and schizophrenia, is that they either don't have gamma waves at all, or that the gamma waves they do have are irregular. Triggering gamma waves in people with these psychiatric conditions, might, the thinking goes, alleviate symptoms.

For decades scientists have suspected that fast-spiking interneurons trigger gamma waves, but lacked the means to prove their theory. Two different technologies, detailed in the two Nature studies, gave scientists the tools to prove their suspicion.

First scientists genetically engineered mice by splicing a gene, originally isolated by algae, that responds to blue light. Next they activated the gene by injecting a genetically engineered virus into a specific region of the brain known as the somatosensory cortex.

The fast-spiking neurons were now primed and ready to fire. All they needed was a spark, and the blue laser was that spark. When the scientists shined a blue laser onto fast-spiking interneurons infected with the engineered virus, they began to fire in sequence, 40 times each second, just like the scientists expected.

The neurons fired as long as the light shined on them, from a few seconds to a few minutes. The neurons continued to fire after the laser was removed, but scientists didn't measure how long the effect lasted. The mice were anesthetized during the procedure, so the induced gamma waves didn't change how the mice behaved.

"This is really powerful technology," said Edward Scolnick, Director of the Psychiatric Disease Program at the Broad Institute. "It allows you to turn on and off specific circuits inside the brain."

This is still basic research, caution scientists, limited to the lab and years away from any clinical or therapeutic use.

But Konstantinos Meletis, another MIT co-author, believes that the blue laser could directly treat autism, schizophrenia or attention deficient disorder.

A much more likely use for the combination of laser and genetic engineering is to indirectly treat psychiatric diseases by helping researchers identify drugs that induce gamma waves, as well as just learning more about how fast-spiking interneurons work, all of which future studies at MIT will examine.

"This is the first type of work addressing these cells, and theoretically you could expect that within years or decades this could be applied to human brains, but there is still plenty of work that needs to be done," said Meletis.
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/29/brain-autism-laser.html

[yunowu]

2009-05-01
For scary speculation about the end of civilization in 2012, people usually turn to followers of cryptic Mayan prophecy, not scientists. But that’s exactly what a group of NASA-assembled researchers described in a chilling report issued earlier this year on the destructive potential of solar storms.

Entitled “Severe Space Weather Events — Understanding Societal and Economic Impacts,” it describes the consequences of solar flares unleashing waves of energy that could disrupt Earth’s magnetic field, overwhelming high-voltage transformers with vast electrical currents and short-circuiting energy grids. Such a catastrophe would cost the United States “$1 trillion to $2 trillion in the first year,” concluded the panel, and “full recovery could take four to 10 years.” That would, of course, be just a fraction of global damages.

Needless to say, shorting out the electrical grid would cause major disruptions to developed nations and their economies.

Worse yet, the next period of intense solar activity is expected in 2012, and coincides with the presence of an unusually large hole in Earth’s geomagnetic shield, meaning we’ll have less protection than usual from the solar flares.

The report received relatively little attention, perhaps because of 2012’s supernatural connotations. Mayan astronomers supposedly predicted that 2012 would mark the calamitous “birth of a new era.”

But the report is credible enough that some scientists and engineers are beginning to take the electromagnetic threat seriously. According to Lawrence Joseph, author of “Apocalypse 2012: A Scientific Investigation into Civilization’s End,” “I’ve been following this topic for almost five years, and it wasn’t
until the report came out that this really began to
freak me out.”

Wired.com talked to Joseph and John Kappenman, CEO of electromagnetic damage consulting company MetaTech, about the possibility of geomagnetic apocalypse — and how to stop it.

Wired.com: Do you think it’s coincidence that the Mayans predicted apocalypse on the exact date when astronomers say the sun will next reach a period of maximum turbulence?

Lawrence Joseph: I have enormous respect for Mayan astronomers. It disinclines me to dismiss this as a coincidence. But I recommend people verify that the Mayans prophesied what people say they did. I went to Guatemala and spent a week with two Mayan shamans who spent 20 years talking to other shamans about the prophecies. They confirmed that the Maya do see 2012 as a great turning point. Not the end of the world, not the great off-switch in the sky, but the birth of the fifth age.

Wired.com: Isn’t a great off-switch in the sky exactly what’s described in the report?

Joseph: The chair of the NASA workshop was Dan Baker at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. Some of his comments, and the comments he approved in the report, are very strong about the potential connection between coronal mass ejections and power grids here on Earth. There’s a direct relationship between how technologically sophisticated a society is and how badly it could be hurt. That’s the meta-message of the report.

I had the good fortune last week to meet with John Kappenman at MetaTech. He took me through a meticulous two-hour presentation about just how vulnerable the power grid is, and how it becomes more vulnerable as higher voltages are sent across it. He sees it as a big antenna for space weather outbursts.

Wired.com: Why is it so vulnerable?

Joseph: Ultra-high voltage transformers become more finicky as energy demands are greater. Around 50 percent already can’t handle the current they’re designed for. A little extra current coming in at odd times can slip them over the edge.

The ultra-high voltage transformers, the 500,000- and 700,000-kilovolt transformers, are particularly vulnerable. The United States uses more of these than anyone else. China is trying to implement some million-kilovolt transformers, but I’m not sure they’re online yet.

Kappenman also points out that when the transformers blow, they can’t be fixed in the field. They often can’t be fixed at all. Right now there’s a one- to three-year lag time between placing an order and getting a new one.

According to Kappenman, there’s an as-yet-untested plan for inserting ground resistors into the power grid. It makes the handling a little more complicated, but apparently isn’t anything the operators can’t handle. I’m not sure he’d say these could be in place by 2012, as it’s difficult to establish standards, and utilities are generally regulated on a state-by-state basis. You’d have quite a legal thicket. But it still might be possible to get some measure of protection in by the next solar climax.

Wired.com: Why can’t we just shut down the grid when we see a storm coming, and start it up again afterwards?

Joseph: Power grid operators now rely on one satellite called ACE, which sits about a million miles out from Earth in what’s called the gravity well, the balancing point between sun and earth. It was designed to run for five years. It’s 11 years old, is losing steam, and there are no plans to replace it.

ACE provides about 15 to 45 minutes of heads-up to power plant operators if something’s coming in. They can shunt loads, or shut different parts of the grid. But to just shut the grid off and restart it is a $10 billion proposition, and there is lots of resistance to doing so. Many times these storms hit at the north pole, and don’t move south far enough to hit us. It’s a difficult call to make, and false alarms really piss people off. Lots of money is lost and damage incurred. But in Kappenman’s view, and in lots of others, this time burnt could really mean burnt.

Wired.com: Do you live your life differently now?

Joseph: I’ve been following this topic for almost five years. It wasn’t until the report came out that it began to freak me out.

Up until this point, I firmly believed that the possibility of 2012 being catastrophic in some way was worth investigating. The report made it a little too real. That document can’t be ignored. And it was even written before the THEMIS satellite discovered a gigantic hole in Earth’s magnetic shield. Ten or twenty times more particles are coming through this crack than expected. And astronomers predict that the way the sun’s polarity will flip in 2012 will make it point exactly the way we don’t want it to in terms of evading Earth’s magnetic field. It’s an astonoshingly bad set of coincidences.

Wired.com: If Barack Obama said, “Lets’ prepare,” and there weren’t any bureaucratic hurdles, could we still be ready in time?

Joseph: I believe so. I’d ask the President to slipstream behind stimulus package funds already appropriated for smart grids, which are supposed to improve grid efficiency and help transfer high energies at peak times. There’s a framework there. Working within that, you could carve out some money for the ground resistors program, if those tests work, and have the initial momentum for cutting through the red tape. It’d be a place to start.


Gridmetatech

Wired.com: What's the problem?

John Kappenman: We've got a big, interconnected grid that spans across the country. Over the years, higher and higher operating voltages have been added to it. This has escalated our vulnerability to geomagnetic storms. These are not a new thing. They've probably been occurring for as long as the sun has been around. It's just that we've been unknowingly building an infrastructure that's acting more and more like an antenna for geomagnetic storms.

Wired.com: What do you mean by antenna?

Kappenman: Large currents circulate in the network, coming up from the earth through ground connections at large transformers. We need these for safety reasons, but ground connections provide entry paths for charges that could disrupt the grid.

Wired.com: What's your solution?

Kappenman: What we're proposing is to add some fairly small and inexpensive resistors in the transformers' ground onnections. The addition of that little bit of resistance would significantly reduce the amount of the geomagnetically induced currents that flow into the grid.

Wired.com: What does it look like?

Kappenman: In its simplest form, it's something that might be made out of cast iron or stainless steel, about the size of a washing machine.

Wired.com: How much would it cost?

Kappenman: We're still at the conceptual design phase, but we think it's do-able for $40,000 or less per resistor. That's less than what you pay for insurance for a transformer.

Wired.com: And less than what you'd willingly pay for insurance on civilization.

Kappenman: If you're talking about the United States, there are about 5,000 transformers to consider this for. The Electromagnetic Pulse Commission recommended it in a report they sent to Congress last year. We're talking about $150 million or so. It's pretty small in the grand scheme of things.

Big power lines and substations can withstand all the other known environmental challenges. The problem with geomagnetic storms is that we never really understood them as a vulnerability, and had a design code that took them into account.

Wired.com: Can it be done in time?

Kappenman: I'm not in the camp that's certain a big storm will occur in 2012. But given time, a big storm is certain to occur in the future. They have in the past, and they will again. They're about one-in-400-year events. That doesn't mean it will be 2012. It's just as likely that it could occur next week.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/storms2012/

[yunowu]

2009-04-30
Comets have always fascinated us. In early cultures, a mysterious appearance of a comet could symbolize a deity's displeasure with humankind or mean a sure failure in battle, at least for one side. Now Tel Aviv University research adds a new twist to that fascination: comets might have provided the elements for the emergence of life on our planet.

While investigating the chemical make-up of comets, Prof. Akiva Bar-Nun of the Department of Geophysics and Planetary Sciences at Tel Aviv University found they were the source of missing ingredients needed for life in Earth's ancient primordial soup. "When comets slammed into the Earth through the atmosphere about four billion years ago, they delivered a payload of organic materials to the young Earth, adding materials that combined with Earth's own large reservoir of organics and led to the emergence of life," says Prof. Bar-Nun.

It was the chemical composition of comets, Prof. Bar-Nun believes, that allowed them to kickstart life. He has published his theory widely in scientific journals, including recently in the journal Icarus.

A Pinch of Argon, A Dash of Xenon

Using a one-of-a-kind machine built at Tel Aviv University, researchers were able to simulate comet ice, and found that comets contain ingredients necessary for providing the basic nutrients of life.

Specifically, Prof. Bar-Nun looked at the noble gases Argon, Krypton and Xenon, because they do not interact with any other elements and are not destroyed by Earth's oxygen. These elements have maintained stable proportions in the Earth's atmosphere throughout the lifetime of the planet, he explains.

"Now if we look at these elements in the atmosphere of the Earth and in meteorites, we see that neither is identical to the ratio in the sun's composition. Moreover, the ratios in the atmosphere are vastly different than the ratios in meteorites which make up the bulk of the Earth. So we need another source of noble gases which, when added to these meteorites or asteroid influx, could change the ratio. And this came from comets.

Solving the Otherworldly Puzzle

Comets are essentially large chunks of ice, whose temperature ranges from -200 to -250 degrees centigrade. Formed in the early days of the solar system far away from the sun, water vapor condensed directly into ice, making little grains. These grains came together to form the comets, which are less than 2/3 of a mile in diameter, explains Prof. Bar-Nun.

During the comets' formation, the porous ice trapped gases and organic chemicals that were present in outer space. "The pattern of trapping of noble gases in the ice gives a certain ratio of Argon to Krypton to Xenon, and this ratio — together with the ratio of gases that come from rocky bodies — gives us the ratio that we observe in the atmosphere of the Earth."

Thus, the arrival on Earth of comets and asteroids led to the necessary ratio of materials for organic life, "which eventually were dissolved in the ocean and started the long process leading to the emergence of life on Earth," says Prof. Bar-Nun.

Asteroid Showers and Thunderstorms

The story started between 4.6 and 3.8 billion years ago, when both the moon and the Earth were bombarded by a flux of asteroids and comets. "On the Earth, most of the craters were obliterated by continental movement and by weathering winds and water erosion. On the moon, they remained as they were," says Prof. Bar-Nun, who adds that no life could thrive during this period of bombardment.

But the Earth recovered, and three to four hundred million years later, fragile forms of life emerged after the comet-delivered elements precipitated into the ocean. "There was another chemical development of these molecules in water, which became more and more complex," says Prof. Bar-Nun, leading to the origin of life on Earth.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090428144126.htm